1) The drinking team with a cricket problem

Australian cricketers have always enjoyed a drink. Speaking of his use of drinking as a motivational ploy during his time as the Australia captain, Ian Chappell said, "when you win you drink to celebrate and when you lose you drink to drown your sorrows and after about four or five beers you are not quite sure what you are doing anyhow."

This beer-soaked culture established many cultural norms in Australian cricket, a number of which were to the betterment of team harmony, but its legacy is also heavily represented in the annals of advertising.

Many other Australian cricketers chanced their drinking arm, from Merv Hughes to a pre health-kick Shane Warne, but all were dwarfed metaphorically, if not literally, by the aura of a short, stocky Tasmanian opening batsman. For years after the famous 1989 Ashes flight from Sydney to London, David Boon refused to talk about his alleged 52-can effort, telling The Australian's Peter Lalor in 2003: "Never spoke about it. Never will." Despite drawing the ire of his coach, the opener walked unassisted from the plane and into cricketing folklore. With interest in the feat growing by the year, Boon eventually caved in to star in a series of VB commercials, while Talking Boony dolls went straight to the national mantelpiece.

2) Simply The Best – in a league of its own

When naming Australian sport's most iconic and successful advertising campaign, it is pretty hard to come to any conclusion other than Simply The Best. The formula was straightforward: huge iconic pop star + anthemic and accessible rock song + footballers smashing into each other = advertising gold.

Personally I have a preference for Tina's What You Get Is What You See her 1989 salvo that was a kind of Simply The Best prototype with a little more sass and the unbeatable combination of Cliff Lyons, Brett Kenny, acid-wash denim and huge hair. The following year though, a legend was born.

It wasn't just the fans who were captivated by the ads, sports branding experts still gush about the way "the song was so stirring, and Tina's delivery so emphatic that you couldn't help but be pulled in by it." It's quite remarkable that, even in the blokey world of sports marketing, the Tina Turner campaign cast such a lengthy shadow that the League didn't use a female voice again until this year's Jessica Mauboy-fronted effort, Rugby League's Got A Hold On Me.

3) The noble game of advertising cricket

The marketing of Australian cricket may have become a constant source of gripes for pundits and punters alike in recent years, but the game has always been at the vanguard of advertising trends and subsequently boasts a rich visual history.

The Packer-commissioned C'mon Aussie C'mon is now so comfortably embedded in the national psyche that it feels as comfortable as an old pair of socks, but at the time it was a brash and bracing new look for cricket. Subsequent years brought us derivative efforts like Go Aussie Go and C'mon Mate, both of which, in paying their dues to the original, inadvertently hinted at their inability to surpass its impact.

For the public profile and bank balances of cricketers, the lowering of the commercial floodgates have been a very good thing. For the rest of us it has yielded a wide array of iconic and embarrassing moments to behold.

5) Joel and Benji Madden commandeer the cricket season

During the summer just gone we became aware that there is indeed something worse than having Doug Bollinger try and sell you a mobile phone and that is having the Madden Brothers try and sell you KFC.

Making the seamless leap from Peta-sympathisers to slavish devotees of the Cult of Colonel Sanders, it wasn't just cricket fans who were steamed at the Maddens' new gig. The commercial marriage of KFC and cricket over the past few seasons has left a grease stain we may never be able to wash away.

First there was "Big Bash with the Bucket Heads". Because the Madden brothers are totally low key dudes who don't like drawing attention to themselves at all, they chose to pull up at the gates of the ground in a pimped out SUV that had the moniker "Good Times" splashed across the side. Hint to the marketing people: the more you tell people they are having a good time, the less they believe it.

They then met up with "The Cricket Master", a man so heavily dedicated to the game that he wears a red KFC t-shirt to games. Moving on from this faux pas, our man then tried to engage the lads in that great Australian cricketing tradition; wearing a KFC bucket on your head? This was a bridge too far even for the Maddens though and I can't really blame them.

"That was amazing, bro!", is a phrase I literally never want to hear spoken at a cricket ground. Subsequent Madden claims that "I feel like I could get out there and play, I really do," made us all fantasise about one of them actually going out there and facing an over from Dale Steyn without pads on. Okay, we'd let them wear a KFC bucket to protect their heads.

"Hanging with the Cricketers" aired fairly late in the summer when many of us thought we had exhausted all our reserves of Madden hatred. We were wrong.

Some people claim that Ricky Ponting's slip-and-slide dismissal to a Jacques Kallis yorker was the visceral, saddening moment that his international career truly died. On the contrary, the end had come when we saw him gurning away next to Joel and Benji in this commercial.

Having been told that street cricket has different rules to normal cricket, one of the Maddens (who really cares enough to nail down which is which?) helpfully informs us that they don't know the rules of cricket anyway. This remains about as surprising as a Mitchell Johnson leg-side wide

But of all the Madden monstrosities, "Barefoot Bowls with Slats" was my favourite. You can imagine this ad was the result of a focus group session that revealed KFC and Cricket Australia's target demographic didn't mind a bit of the old barefoot bowls, a truly disturbing societal trend. What you can't imagine is any kind of focus group in hell that thought that Slats should team a navy blazer with red floral board shorts.

"I'm a little self-conscious," says a Madden. Please keep in mind that this is coming from the mouth of a man covered from head to toe in piercings, tattoos , hair dye and the kind of clothing that Alice Cooper would have considered a bit garish.

There are longer 'uncut' versions of some of the Madden japes on YouTube. Don't watch them. Even when doing so in the name of research my skin literally crawled off my body because it was too embarrassed on behalf of the game of cricket.

6) That's Australian gold my friend

If the recent spate of performance-enhancing-drug scandals have done anything, it has been to reemphasise the virtuous character and values we project onto our brightest stars. Australians also love a winner and there is no surer sign of sporting success in Australia than getting your face on television commercials.